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Does any body have experience painting 40k minis using just oil paints. I got my 1st mini set a few days ago but i just discovered that there are no hobby shops in my city and libraries don't usually sell acrylic color that are suited for painting minis. There is however, an abundance of oil paints. I tried painting my 1st ork boy using those after priming it and it was OK for a first try but I had a problem with spreading the paint, removing brush marks and blending. If any of you guys has tricks and techniques I would really appreciate it. Also some people recomended I buy paint sets from amazon, but i live in the middle east and having to wait a month plus pay a 20 dollar shipping fee every time i wanna get some paints in not a good option for me.

Ps. the things i have now for painting are:
a set of oil paints
some acrylics paints (cheap)
white spirits
and an OK brush set

Never done it myself. This guy seems to find it works well... But looks like he's using oil on top of acrylic base coats. The big thing I'd be worried about is he mentions needing 3-4 DAYS drying time at room temperature!

http://massivevoodoo.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/tutorial-miniature-painting-with-oil.html

Oil paints can be used on mini's, but an oil paint is more like a gel, then a liquid, and if you look at any canvas for oil it has brush strokes and paint piled up.

Most of the time, on a mini, you do not want to do anything to create excess material on top of the model itself.

I've never seen it done on a whole army.

Oils work really well on faces, or on small details, when you're getting the brush to move small amounts of paint around and splicing together the paints you're putting on to give the illusion of complexity - fooling the eye, etc.

Oils can work with grime, rust, with muck and dirt on tank tracks and boots where it looks appropriate for the model surface to look that way - but most of the time you aren't going to want to be making big broad strokes of oil paint on miniatures.

You are also going to be waiting a long time for your paint to dry, which makes it sort of impractical to work with.

As the other commenter pointed out: you can put oil on top of acrylic and painting mini's is a lot about finding a balance. You don't want to add too much to the detail of the image because unlike a canvas a miniature has it's own details, and a lot of the character in the models will be reflected that way.

Typically painting with water based paints allows for the use of a shading wash - and that's a really quick way to coat an area, with a very thin amount of paint that won't leave a lot of brush strokes... and most of the time miniatures which are meant to represent 'an army', don't want to have a spectrum of colours - but a very redundant and repetitive, uniform, few.

Most painters for mini's pick out big components of the army, get the models ready, and do a lot of the initial work with an airbrush and thin coats of watery paint.

You aren't painting a canvas, but an object with dimension, and you want to take advantage of that - and you also want to exaggerate it by highlighting the edges.

In places when you want to add the appearance of shadows that aren't really there, to make it look like there are structures that aren't really there: then you can use oil paints.

You can also use oil paints when you want to exaggerate the appearance of a painted surface - for example if you want to paint oil on top of a flat surface as some orky graffito.

Painting minis with oil paints is definitely not going to be the easiest thing to do.

You can look at some tutorials on youtube and pay attention to how they apply and blend the paint to avoid brush marks and whatnot.

I did play around with painting full areas with nothing but oils (for the purposes of blending, oils are way easier to blend than acrylics) but in the end I decided that it was easier to use acrylics for a base coat and then build up highlights and shades with the oils.

Here's some vids...




This video is NSFW (thus spoilered) with a naked female model being painted, but you can see how the modeller applies the oils in such a way that avoid brush marks. The paint is actually applied quite thick but you keep working it after it's been applied to get rid of the brush marks....


This one uses oils over acrylic base, but some of the application techniques still apply...



Here's another video, again I think he painted over an acrylic base, but you can see the technique he uses to blend out the colours and make sure there's not brush marks....



You can probably start to see that people who do use oils tend to paint models larger than 28mm, and they still often use acrylics for their base coat and then use the oils for the more subtle layering.

Oil has no equal when it comes to blending, shading and color work. However, in order to mix the oil paint to a proper consistency to paint a mini and not show brush marks and obliterate details, it would definitely take it into the 'need about a week' for each coat to dry category. That would be great when working on a big model where you will work for days blending colors and such. I am not sure most mini painters desire to work that way. Especially if just starting out.

My suggestion would be to search for a good mini suitable acrylic paint set with some basic colors and washes in the tones you like to work in. Just go online and then it does not matter if no store close to you sells this kind of paint - the internet brings the world to your door!

it might be ideal f want a perfect gradiant and doing work on something like a battle titans armour plates.

however on somthing smaller like troops, there may be more effectice methods.

Oil Paints never fully cure.

I think they are a terrible option for something you are going to be touching, moving around, and playing with.

If it's just for a display piece then sure. But feth... Oil has so many problems.

You need chemical cleaners. It all fades/yellows over time, the aforementioned never actually curing. Crazy dry times.

I really enjoy oils for actual paints. But for game pieces? I would never.

 Lance845 wrote:
You need chemical cleaners. It all fades/yellows over time, the aforementioned never actually curing. Crazy dry times.

My understanding was that only the cheap oils would fade, and that yellowing comes from using a high % of linseed oil and we usually don't thin oil paints with more linseed oil when painting miniatures, it's more of a problem for people who paint on canvas.

As for chemical cleaners, you need stronger solvents to be used as thinners, but cleaning wise you can actually clean up oils with soap and water. Water alone will do nothing, but get a bar of hand soap and rub it in to the dirty brush and you'll be able to gently massage out the oil paint. Because oils take so long to dry I just wait until I finish with a painting session and then take the brushes in to the bathroom to clean out them out in the sink with soap and water.

Sometimes I use oils without thinning them and my brushes love it, between the oil paint and the soap and water deep clean afterwards it almost reconditions the brush somewhat (but not if you use white spririts/turps/metho as a thinner, natural hair brushes don't like those sorts of thinners).

I've done it lots. It's fine. It's just different.

I don't know how easily you'll be able to get it, but the best thing I found for oils for miniatures is an alkyd medium. It supplies the paint with what it needs to complete it's chemical reaction with oxygen more rapidly so it cures in days rather than a week (or more). Liquin, Galquin, Alkyd Walnut medium, there are loads of names. You can also get oil paints that already have the Alkyd medium in them. Whever you get oil paints should have access to some sort of medium like this. As well, you'll also find as it is a liquid medium, it'll make the paint smoother and easier to paint/move on the model. And there will be less brush strokes.

It's not actually true that oil paint never fully cures. It works on oxidation and once everything in the layer of paint that can accept an oxygen molecule has done so, it's cured.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
So the best way to paint to not get brush strokes is to remove paint by stippling blends.

Small tougher brushes like bristle hair or a stiff synthetic are good for this. You basically put one colour near the other and jab at them with the brush to blend them on the surface. And you have a cloth there and you just keep wiping the brush off. The end result will be a smooth coat (often with a great blend from the shadow to the high point) and no excess paint on the model to make brush strokes.

Downside? it's hard on the brushes.

John Blanche uses a lot of oil paint on his minis and they look great!

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
You need chemical cleaners. It all fades/yellows over time, the aforementioned never actually curing. Crazy dry times.

My understanding was that only the cheap oils would fade, and that yellowing comes from using a high % of linseed oil and we usually don't thin oil paints with more linseed oil when painting miniatures, it's more of a problem for people who paint on canvas.

You understood wrong. Even high end house paint that is oil paint yellows over time. It's less noticable in darker colors but a lot of people use oil based whites for trim packs and doors and that gak will yellow noticeably within 5-10 years at the latest 3 at the earliest. It's impossible to touch up in the future because of it.

Paints are an emulsion composed of basically 3 base components. The base (water, oil, lacquer) in which the other components are suspended and impacts how you thin/clean/and many of the properties of how it dries and reacts with different surfaces. The body, a mixture of the other chemicals in the paint that help give it it's properties. And the pigments, that give it it's color.

The thing with acrylic/latex paints is they are literally plastic. They have chemicals called surfactants in the body that help cause the water in the paint to evaporate/off gas out of the paint evenly leaving the plastic behind. Water based paints don't yellow because they are literally nothing but the plastic and pigment when it's all said and done.

Not so with oils. The pigments are sitting in the oil base. Doesn't matter what that oil is. Which is why it never really dries and also why it yellows. If you start painting your army now in oils and continue with the same scheme and technique for the next 3 years your first model will be noticeably different from your last by the end of that 3rd year because of the yellowing. It will be INCREDIBLY different by the end of the 5th. And god forbid something happens to the soft, not drying, oil paint on the model and it ends up scratched or needing to be touched up. Well... the farther down the line that is the more it will have yellowed and your going to start having to mix paints to color match the now yellowed rest of the model to touch it up.

With acrylics you only need to worry about fading from sunlight. Luckily we mostly store them inside of trays, bins, bags, or cases away from windows so the sun can't do it's thing and the models stay safe from the degrading effects of the sun.

Also... good acrylic house paint takes 15-30 years to fade depending on color. So... much better then the 3-5 regardless of any environmental factors that oil has.

Interesting, didn't know that.

After researching some more it seems that yellowing is a bigger problem with oils if they aren't exposed to light, especially during the drying process. If it does yellow they can sometimes be bleached by sunlight. Apparently they can also yellow from ammonia, which can be present in acrylics and acrylic thinners so if you use an oil over an acrylic that hasn't been given a sufficient time (eg. weeks) to cure that can be a problem, particularly in the house paints that you mention.

http://www.wetcanvas.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1374376

http://cool.conservation-us.org/jaic/articles/jaic24-02-002.html

http://www.wetcanvas.com/forums/showthread.php?t=955898

I dug up some models I painted white about 25 years ago with oil based enamels, they have yellowed a touch but so little that I wouldn't have noticed if I weren't looking for it. They've also been stored in the dark for the past 20 years or so (though would have been on display for the first 5).

I've noticed some models painted with acrylics from the same period have faded slightly (having had a similar life of being stored for 20ish or so years), so swings and round abouts I suppose.

Not so with oils. The pigments are sitting in the oil base. Doesn't matter what that oil is. Which is why it never really dries

This doesn't sound right to me. Linseed oil (and the oil in alkyd enamels) crosslinks through an oxidative process. It takes a long time and it remains more elastic than some other coatings, but surely once it's crosslinked we would call that cured (thus "dried")?

Also I'm not sure how relevant your examples of house paint would be. House paints are applied in much thicker films than those we apply to models, so if the problem is lack of light during the curing time it's going to be much worse for house paints than model paints.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

I dug up some models I painted white about 25 years ago with oil based enamels, they have yellowed a touch but so little that I wouldn't have noticed if I weren't looking for it. They've also been stored in the dark for the past 20 years or so (though would have been on display for the first 5).

It's harder to notice when viewing it in a vacuum. I assume you don't have the same kinds of paints any more considering it was 25 years ago. But if you painted up one more model with the same whites right now you would see how drastic of a change it has had. Again, less of an issue when they are all roughly the same age and you have no need to do any touch up. but the fresh white would stand out like a sore thumb when placed next to your older guys.

I've noticed some models painted with acrylics from the same period have faded slightly (having had a similar life of being stored for 20ish or so years), so swings and round abouts I suppose.

Not so with oils. The pigments are sitting in the oil base. Doesn't matter what that oil is. Which is why it never really dries

This doesn't sound right to me. Linseed oil (and the oil in alkyd enamels) crosslinks through an oxidative process. It takes a long time and it remains more elastic than some other coatings, but surely once it's crosslinked we would call that cured (thus "dried")?

Also I'm not sure how relevant your examples of house paint would be. House paints are applied in much thicker films than those we apply to models, so if the problem is lack of light during the curing time it's going to be much worse for house paints than model paints.

The thickness of the film wont matter if the paint is well mixed and applied evenly. And if the sunlight was going to be as big of a factor as is implied above then you would notice distinct lines in the house from places where the sunlight hits directly through a window and places where furniture is blocking it. I worked several years in a paint store doing tons of color matching on samples bought in from homes and talking/working with both home owners and contractors and I have never seen a piece of oil painted trim with 2 distinct colors on it because of sun like that.

I've used oil paints on minis. They're much easier to blend due to the slow drying time, but the drying time makes it really not worth it.

You need to let it dry between layers if you're thinning it enough to allow the details to show - so you need to wait at least a few days between layers. (will still be 'wet', but dry enough to layer).

The only benefit i see is the workability, which can be achieved with an acrylic retarder - a gel that slows the drying time of acrylics.

My personal vote on oils is 'No."

I think the drying time is 100% good or bad based on your own work flow. When I did oils on miniaturs regularly I simply had stuff I was working on and would put it in a cupboard after applying paint and the next session I'd work on something else. With the alkyd medium I could often paint the next colour the next day or the day after. It was no big deal.

There is however, something to be said for staying on one project until it is done. Instead I had to stay on 2 or 3 things going at once.